Exchanging Project Data with Other Applications

There are many reasons why you might find it useful to be able to share all or part of a Microsoft Project 2000 document with another software application. One common reason is the desire to prepare reports in other applications. Other purposes include using another application for additional analysis or processing of Project data and archiving an organization's history of projects. Similarly, it is often useful to copy data from other applications into Microsoft Project, especially to avoid retyping large amounts of data. The following scenarios illustrate some of the uses for a data-exchange capability:

You might want to copy some of your Project information to a PowerPoint presentation or to a report that you want to put together in Word or Excel (or other similar office software applications).

You might have a list of tasks or resource names in Word or Excel that you want to use in a Project document. It is faster and more accurate to import the data than to key it in again in Project.

You might want to process some of your Project data using the special facilities or calculating power of Microsoft Excel.

There might be others in your organization who want to query aspects of the project but who don't know how to use Project. If the project is saved in a database, you can work on it in Project and they can use Access-aware applications to view the Project data details.

You might want other applications to be able to query the data in a Project file directly using the data-sharing capabilities of Microsoft's OLE DB.

You might want to keep an archive of all projects for a department or organization, which can be used to review the history for a resource or to calculate performance statistics over a longer time period.

You might need to make the project available to someone who has an older version of Microsoft Project, or to someone who uses another project management application.

You might prefer to distribute new schedule notices or other reports on a corporate intranet or on the Internet, via Web pages.